indie interview

Well, I seem to like zombie survival RPGs a lot. Heck, I’m making one. Anyway, today I talked with the creator of Survivalist, and it was an interesting talk with an interesting guy. The game’s taking an interesting approach to combining open-world gameplay and story. Check it out!

Q: Do you mind introducing yourself, bob_the_pr_bot?

A: Bob the PR Bot was originally a highly advanced AI developed by the NSA to spy on Europeans. Sadly, Bob the PR Bot’s contract with the NSA was terminated abruptly after that bastard Edward Snowden revealed what they were up to. Now Bob the PR Bot works for the private sector, advertising video games.

Q: Interesting…? What is Survivalist, in a nutshell?

A: Survivalist is a story-driven RPG/RTS set in the zombie apocalypse, about a wealthy asshole named Joe Wheeler who emerges from his bunker looking for food. You have to find other survivors, gain their respect, get them to join you and build a community. Once they’ve joined you, you can play as them. Different characters have different abilities and personalities. The aim was to combine storytelling and characters with open-world gameplay and choices as much as possible.

Q: How have reviews been so far? Any feedback you’ve gotten and learned from?

A: Reviews have been good: 5/5 at theindiemine.com, 4.5/5 at indiegamereviewer.com, top 10 in thexblig.com leaderboard. I’ve had a lot of feedback which has been very helpful, in allowing me to fix bugs and provide more explanation for things that were confusing.

The biggest things were:
– Don’t use small fonts in a console game!
– A lot of people found the mechanic where you have to keep getting insulin for Alice quite taxing. I responded by making the insulin cheaper, and last longer, so it’s easier – but I didn’t want to change it too much as it’s one of the main themes of the game.
– Apparently, lots of people would like a version of the game that has multiplayer, melee weapons and vehicles.

Q: Is there any features in particular that you hope will help the game stand out?

A: What I like most about my favourite games is when you have the combination of story, action, and long-term strategy all working together and I hope that’s where Survivalist stands out.

There are some more specific features that people have commented on as being quite unique:
– The zombies are fast and leap at you like animals instead of shambling towards you, so the combat has a different feel to most zombie games.
– The game has two viewports – a main window with a top-down third-person perspective and a smaller window in the top-right and shows your character’s face, or the face of whoever you are talking to, or various other things depending on context. It makes it easier to tell the characters apart and shows their personality.
– The dialogue system is quite unusual – when you face a character you get a list of speech options that you can cycle through with the d-pad or mouse-wheel, but you can walk away from it at any time, even during conversation. There isn’t a “conversation mode” as there is in most games that feature dialogue choices.
– Characters have memories of the things you’ve done – e.g. if you’ve done a quest for them, given them a gift, or mugged them. These memories are added together to form two metrics: Approval and Respect. Approval means they like you, Respect means they know you mean business. If someone respects you but doesn’t approve of you, that means they’re afraid of of you – conversely if they approve of you but don’t respect you that means they pity you.

Q: Do you have any interesting or amusing stories involving the game’s development?

A: When I started the game I was going to call it “Zombie Apocalypse” but had to change it because another game was released with that name. I originally intended to make the agent of zombie infection a fungus, after watching the zombie ants video that went viral way back when – a bit later a little game called The Last of Us was announced and I decided not to do that. Much later during development I played Telltale’s The Walking Dead and there’s a story in there about getting insulin for someone with diabetes, and I thought fuck it, I’m not changing anything. Later still I found out about a game called State of Decay, which was an open-world game about building a community of survivors in the zombie apocalypse. Oh, and another one called Project Zomboid, and another called Dead State… The moral of the story is, don’t make a zombie game!

Q: I know the feeling. I’m making one. What in your mind is the most important thing you need to make a great game?

A: Money! Actually no… a computer! No, wait, it’s probably talent. A team of talented and hard-working individuals. Who need to be paid with money… yeah, it is money after all isn’t it?

Q: On a quick side-note, any good games you’re playing right now?

A: I’m between games at the moment, waiting for Dragon Age: Inquisition. The most recent game I played was The Last of Us: Remastered, which was brilliant of course, one of the best games ever made in my opinion. Having the option to use stealth in most of the combat, for me really improved it over Uncharted, which tends to degenerate into a linear shoot-fest. And if you turn the difficulty up as high as it’ll go it makes it very tense hiding behind a wall listening to bandits or infected wander past and trying to figure out your next move.

My goodness, what a few weeks. Ah well, IndieGraph (an indie games blog I wrote and once edited for) finally ended its run after getting hacked and basically temporarily shut down, and if you want to hear from the headman himself, here’s a great post from him that sums up our story. In any case, when it was closed, one interview never got finished and posted. It didn’t feel right to leave him hanging, and I thus had no choice but to post it here to fulfill said obligation and show this great game to the world. This inspired me. This blog needs more content, besides boring ol’ me rambling, so I decided to do this once or twice a month (depending on how I’m feeling), kind of like a recurring segment.

So without further ado, here I talk to SmashGames about his survival multiplayer platformer, Roguelands. It may be a bit out-of-date by now. Feedback, as always, is encouraged.

Q: Do you mind introducing yourself, SmashGames? Are you a team or one person?

A: My name is Sean Young, and I’m a senior at the University of Central Florida studying Computer Science. I founded SmashGames in January of this year, and so far it has been just me making games. I started out in the mobile scene with about 10 games but then decided to move to PC.

My very first PC game Magicite ended up being pretty successful after getting on Steam, so I definitely want to stick with PC for awhile and see what I can do better as a game designer and developer.

Q: What is Roguelands, in a nutshell? Is it well known what the disaster is, or is that up to interpretation?

A: Roguelands has only been in development for about three weeks now (POSTER’S NOTE: This is out of date now since this interview was done weeks ago anyway), so nothing is really set in stone. What I do know is that it will be a multiplayer RPG that is highly influenced by DayZ and Fallout.

Players will be able to create a game or join another one from a lobby, making things much easier to play with friends instead of the need for port-forwarding. The world will be procedurally generated with cities, farmlands, underground sewers, and much more! Players can then explore this world and try to survive by finding gear and loot, all while watching out for monsters and other players.

Roguelands should be on Steam Early Access hopefully in 3 to 4 months. It will most likely be $9.99 for PC, MAC, and LINUX!

Q: There’s some obvious DayZ-esque inspirations here, but is there any others? What are you planning on standing out with?

A: I’ve kind of become obsessed with DayZ recently, because it is so much more than just a zombie survival game. It isn’t flashy, is has an insane amount of bugs, and it is a hassle to find your friends and play with them. So why is it amazing? Because no other game has made me feel more stressed out or nervous when I see another player, and no other game has provided me with the same amount of satisfaction upon getting a kill. Any wrong move could be the end of you. I really wanted to capture that post apocalyptic setting with players not knowing if they could trust each other. I’m also a big fan of Fallout 3, and would like to implement some of the RPG elements into Roguelands!

Q: How is Unity to work with? Any strengths and weaknesses that stick out at you about the engine?

A: Unity is the only game engine I’ve worked with (aside from RPG Maker a long time ago) and it has been just amazing. There are so many tutorials online for everything and the community is very active. Since I haven’t tried any of the other big game engines I guess I can’t really provide comparisons. I don’t see myself changing engines anytime soon.

Q: How is coding the multiplayer aspect? Any problems? How do you plan to deal with hacking, cheating, etc.?

A: For Magicite, multiplayer made things really difficult. But now I have a lot more knowledge of how network coding works so things should be a lot smoother. Also, I’m using Photon for Roguelands so players will have an easy time finding a game in a lobby. As for cheating and stuff, I’ve got a few ideas for handling all of that but there definitely will be many testing phases before the official launch to prevent cheating as much as possible.

Q: Just quickly switching gears, what other games have you made, or are down the pipeline (that you’d like to point out)?

A: My very first game was a mobile infinite runner called Backyard Zombies. It kinda sucks but I think it is okay for a first game. Then I continued to make a few crappy mobile games, and eventually created a cool lane defense game called Pixel Kingdom. That actually had a Kickstarter campaign and raised over $5000! After that is when I moved to PC and madeMagicite, which has been way more successful than all of my other games. I hope everyone loves Roguelands even more!

Q: Do you have any parting thoughts? Thanks!

A: Thanks for having an interest in Roguelands. I will definitely keep the community updated on how the game is coming along with new pictures, gifs, and info!